In translation

What this collection most clearly documents is Calvino’s tireless activism in the service of ‘the renewal of the Italian cultural climate’. In the letter he wrote to the influential Marxist literary magazine Il Contemporaneo in 1956, for example, he acerbically critiques the way it fails to keep up with contemporary Italian literature…

According to Rancière, modern democratic politics and modern non-classical arts are two manifestations of the same new, revolutionary social space. In this space, sensibility or sense perception (aisthesis in Greek: the origin of the word aesthetics) is shared and distributed across social divides, providing the impetus for both a new egalitarian politics and a new democratic regime of artistic appreciation and practice, which Rancière has called the aesthetic regime of art.

In its six essays on five writers and a painter, his gaze operates like a form of scansion, picking up the long and short sounds (moments musicaux as Sebald calls them, via Schubert) in order to get behind the art in all its grief and consolation, to discover the differentiation between the life and the work.

Here lies one of the key challenges for a modern translator. How to get the dramatis personae to communicate across the centuries? The convention is to provide some contextual information in footnotes and appendices, but James wants none of this pedantry and aims instead to incorporate essential points in the verse.